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By now, you’ve probably heard Cris Carter’s bizarre “lesson” about every crew needing a fall guy from the 2014 NFL Rookie Symposium. The quote got national attention due to a recent ESPN feature on retired linebacker Chris Borland, who attended the Symposium and expressed his disgust with the quote, saying that he wanted to leave the room after hearing it, but he didn’t want to make a scene.
As it turns out, Borland isn’t the only person who was shocked by the quote. Robert Klemko was given unprecedented access to the event so he could write a lengthy piece for TheMMQB.com. However, as he explained in a message posted on Twitlonger today, it came at a price: the NFL had the right to tell him when something that was said in the Symposium was “off the record.”
I agreed to the NFL’s condition that I would not enter the small group sessions, and there would be one or two things the league could look back on and say, ‘that was off the record.’…Personally, I only agree to these omissions when the subject matter is immaterial to what I gather is the larger point of the story, which, in the case of the symposium, I believed Carter’s comment was.
As you can probably guess, one of the things that occurred that fell under that umbrella was Carter’s quote. As Klemko explained, right as Carter told the rookies to make sure they had a fall guy, the league’s vice president of strategic development and operations explained to him that the quote couldn’t go into the story.
When Carter said the words, “have a fall guy” in what was a light-hearted and animated session that at times made league employees in attendance cringe, the NFL’s Kim Fields looked my way and said, “that can’t go in the story.”
Klemko explained that he didn’t want to leave certain things out, but argued that it was more important that told the public “95% of an untold story” compared to none of it, so he accepted the NFL’s stipulations. He pointed out that he didn’t believe this quote was emblematic of the Symposium as a whole, but it’s still strange that the NFL would try to handle Carter’s quote this way, especially considering the league posted the video of Carter saying this online.
(via Robert Klemko, ProFootballTalk)
